Tag: perpetual war

On March 16, The New York Times reported that “Ukrainian forces have pulled almost entirely out of the Kursk region of Russia.” After seven months, one Ukrainian soldier told the BBC, “Everything is finished in the Kursk region.”

Back on August 6, 2024, the Ukrainian armed forces surprised both Russia and Western analysts with a lightning advance across the Russian border into 500 square miles of Russia’s Kursk region. Although the offensive caught the Russian military by surprise – and the area had been left relatively undefended – the territory concerned contained little of strategic significance.

If the offensive achieved anything straight away, it was to cause some embarrassment for the Russian government that Ukrainian forces could take pre-2022 Russian territory. At the same time, it certainly provided some short-term propaganda benefit at home and in the West: a small morale boost to Ukrainian military and its wider population that was no doubt getting used to bleak news from the frontline after the failure of Ukraine’s much vaunted summer 2023 counteroffensive.

Like in so many battles in this war, and like in so many battles in Russian and Soviet history, the Russian armed forces accommodated to changing circumstances. As in the war as a whole, after a seemingly reckless – or in this case careless – initial phase, they started to introduce more resources, set realistic expectations for success, became more methodical in their approach and introduced innovative new weapons and appropriate tactics to best utilize them.

Back in August 2024, there may also have been a deliberate decision of the Russian military command to push the Ukrainian troops out of Kursk in slow motion because their prolonged presence there kept the best trained and best equipped Ukrainian troops off the battlefield that really mattered in eastern Ukraine. The decision to accelerate the operation and push them out very recently was no doubt motivated by the prospect of seemingly inevitable ceasefire negotiations driven by the U.S. Trump administration.

The final stages of Ukraine’s Kursk offensive certainly did not go well for Ukraine. Only days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that the Ukrainian troops were “completely isolated and under complete fire control.” He also suggested that getting out was increasingly “impossible.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted that Putin was “lying.” Ukraine’s military was adamant that “[r]eports of the alleged ‘encirclement’ of Ukrainian units by the enemy in the Kursk region are false and fabricated by the Russians… There is no threat of encirclement of our units.”

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This suggests that Russia expects a political settlement or at least an armistice within the next six months so it’s now prioritizing the further legitimization of its control over the new regions by finally completing their legal integration into the country at the local administrative level by 10 September.

Putin signed a decree on Thursday obligating all Ukrainians in Russia without valid residence documents to legalize their stay by 10 September. They can do this by either applying for Russian citizenship via the simplified procedure for Ukrainian nationals that entered into force in summer 2022 or for residency by either proving legal employment or enrollment in a Russian education program. Many assumed that this had already happened some time ago, especially in the new regions, yet it’s only just now occurring.

Some Ukrainian nationals’ legally ambiguous status doesn’t mean that the state isn’t aware of who they are and what they’re doing, just that it wasn’t hitherto a priority to clarify this with regard to Russian law, likely due to stereotypically slow bureaucracy and the state’s focus on waging the special operation. With the Ukrainian Conflict drawing to a close due to the nascent Russian–US “New Détente”, it’s now time to wrap up loose ends such as these for further legitimizing Russia’s control over its new regions.

Ukrainian and other foreign nationals must therefore legalize their presence there just as they’d have to do in any other country otherwise it would look like Russia is doubting the legitimacy of its own claims by making an exception for these locals. If Putin didn’t get around to decreeing that this is finally done within less than six months, the timeframe of which suggests approximately how long he expects the peace process to last at max, then that category of residents would literally be above the law.

From there, Ukraine could claim that Russia is “atoning for its guilty conscience of illegally occupying foreign land” by letting the locals over whom the state assumed responsibility “preserve their separate Ukrainian legal status”, thus serving as the pretext for Kiev to meddle in those lands after hostilities end. By mandating that they voluntarily legalize their presence in line with Russian law or be deported, Moscow neutralizes Kiev’s aforesaid claims, thus delegitimizing any post-conflict meddling on that basis.

In other words, this decree is meant to facilitate the incipient peace process by fortifying Russia’s legal claims to the four former Ukrainian regions that unified with it after September’s 2022 referenda, which reaffirms that Russia won’t cede these lands since they’re now being fully treated as integral territories. They were constitutionally considered as such for over two and a half years, but local bureaucracy took a long time to catch up in all legal regards, though that’s finally changing as a result of Putin’s decree.

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